May 2011

05/16/2011

Deadlines, for people whose day jobs involve writing, are a harsh but necessary reality. Newspaper reporters face them on a daily basis. Folks in public relations usually have looser targets for completing written works, but they have deadlines just the same.

I’ve been in both worlds so suffice it to say, I’ve had to meet my share of deadlines.

Famous novelists also have deadlines, especially if their publisher has a targeted publication date for their next bestseller. But what of us unpublished wannbes? Well, to keep a fire lit under our bums, we can impose our own deadlines – which is exactly what I did last year when drafting LOCO MOCO MAMA, with a little help from National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

Now I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo and likely never will. Such an exercise, which involves writing a novel in November, requires a form of discipline foreign to my being. Fifty-thousand words in 30 days? Talk about deadlines!

But one of the cool byproducts of NaNoWriMo are various “report cards” developed by smart people out there in the Internets. These are usually Excel sheets that help NaNoWriMo participants track their word counts, and enable them to stay on track for completing their entry before their month is up. Google “NaNoWriMo + report card” or “NaNoWriMo + Excel” and you’ll find a bunch of them.

When writing my initial draft of LOCO MOCO MAMA, I took one of these Excel sheets and adapted it by devising a targeted word count and imposing a deadline well into the future, simply by adding sheet rows as you would with any other Excel document. This doc helped me finish the manuscript well ahead of my “deadline.”

Try it with your writing project. You may not finish your novel in a month, but perhaps this helpful tool will keep you writing and maybe you’ll finish before you know it.

05/05/2011

Recently I spoke with Noelani B. Lee, the private investigator heroine of my as-yet unpublished novel, LOCO MOCO MAMA. I asked Noe to tell me her story in a nutshell and she happily consented, even though she had just wrapped-up a case and hadn't slept a wink in three days. Plus the forecast for her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, called for rain, so we had to make it quick. Anyway, here's what she had to tell me:

Aloha. My name is Noelani B. Lee and I am a licensed private investigator with a hormone problem.

Yeah, I know. I’ll get to that later.

Let’s see, about me… I was born in Hilo, Hawaii, thirty-something years ago. All right, closer to forty than thirty, but that’s as close to a real number as you’re going to get, so deal with it.

Yep, I’m a native but I’m only “Hawaiian” in the modern definition of the term. See, I’m mostly Chinese but also part Samoan, Korean, Portuguese, Filipino and Japanese. A lot of that is on my Mom’s side. But there’s no pure Hawaiian blood in me, so even though I love my home islands I’m not too totally into the “Hawaiian pride” thing. I have a few friends you might call “militant” who can’t understand why I feel this way. What they don’t understand is I have more important things to do.

Now’s probably a good time to skip ahead and tell you how I became a P.I., which was something I never could have planned for my life. You’ll understand better when I tell you more about my past.

It happened after I moved back to Hilo from Las Vegas several years ago. You see, there was this incident late one night when a politician assaulted me in a secluded corner of a casino parking garage, on the Vegas Strip. He was running for Senate and I was merely a waitress at a seafood restaurant, so who was going to believe me, right? The next day some high-priced political operative offered to buy my silence with a briefcase full of cash. He suggested I take it, get back to Hawaii, and stay quiet about the whole thing. I figured, his friend was a shoe-in for election, so why not up the ante. I had all the leverage. So it took some skillful negotiating on my part but I got him to agree to almost double what he was giving me. He said all right, I’d get the rest later. But funny thing, after came back to Hilo I never saw the extra cash.

Not one penny.

In hindsight, I probably should have given up on the whole thing. But see, I have a long memory. I’m also a great believer in karma, even though I like to give it a little nudge from time to time. This means I’m not quite finished with the senator and his buddy. My ultimate plan is to nudge some seriously awesome karma their way, one day. Trust me. It’ll happen.

Okay, enough of that. Back to my life up to this point.

I’m the youngest of three sisters. Kalena, the oldest, is a nun on the mainland and Pualani, the middle one, is a radical lesbian and a florist in Honolulu. I don’t speak with them except on birthdays and some religious holidays. To be honest we were never what you could call “close.” That’s mostly because we have different opinions about our father, who’s doing a long stretch in Lompoc for various RICO violations.

See, I was nine when my father, Quon, got busted and lost just about everything, his legitimate business which paid the bills and another one we didn’t know anything about, some import/export thing. After that my mother, Coco, did her best but you know, raising three snotty girls who treated each other like dogs do fire hydrants, alone, under one roof? No wonder she went prematurely gray.

If there is a God, He needs to bless her. I don’t blame her for moving to Kauai a few years ago. She needed to get out of the old place and start fresh before she got too old to enjoy herself. I fly over to visit every once in a while and I see she’s happy now. She spends her days making leis for tourists and feeding chickens and I swear, she smiles, too.

I always thought Dad was a total jerk for what he did to Mom and us kids. After it happened Kalena became exceedingly introverted, then she got religion and was all about Jesus and less about family. Then there’s Pualani, who viewed Dad as some anti-establishment hero and began emulating him in her own way. Did I tell you she once got busted for mooning Bill Gates as he was giving a speech? What made it really bad was she had the Apple logo tattooed on her butt.

But I digress.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I was a pretty happy kid once I accepted the fact Dad was a crook and moved on with my life. But not long after the whole fiasco our family doctor diagnosed me with a hormonal imbalance called hyperadrenalism. Long story short, it involves an overabundance of cortisol in the blood. We found out about it when I didn’t seem to be developing as a young woman at the same pace as my friends. You know, flat chest, narrow hips, that sort of thing. Although I do have awesome legs, if I may say so myself. Anyway, there are nasty things that come with the worst cases of this disease, like big-time facial and body hair. Lucky for me I didn’t have those issues, except I can grow hair on my legs almost on demand, which is useful when I’m on a job and I need to go undercover.

The cool thing about my condition is I can lower my voice to sound like a man. No, really, it’s a symptom. Look it up. You combine that trick with my nearly total lack of boobs and I can fool just about anyone into believing I am a man, even at five-five, one-twenty soaking wet. And, having developed a gift for disguise, I can infiltrate places that I couldn’t if I was just Noe. Oh and my favorite alias is “Bruce,” which happens to be my middle name. Yeah. Long story.

I also have two wardrobes – my regular, girly-girl clothes, mostly shorts and tee-shirts from Target and Costco, and my undercover man clothes, mostly shorts and tee-shirts from the Salvation Army and Goodwill.

Now, don’t go thinking I’m some he-woman or hermaphrodite. At the risk of sounding stuck up, I’m not bad looking at all. Maybe even pretty enough that I almost got married – twice. Once was with a lawyer I met after I graduated from community college and became a court reporter. A few months after we started dating he got disbarred then ran off with a partner’s niece and that was the end of that. Then a couple years later another lawyer dumped me for a flight attendant. So, lesson learned: No more lawyers. They’re jerks.

After that second dumping I moved to Vegas. I told Mom I needed a change, which didn’t make her happy but I figured it was worth a shot. Even though I hated the place, I gave Vegas a chance. I moved in with my cousin Wanda and things went well for a few years until the episode with the creepy old politician and his money-bag friend. I couldn’t get away from Vegas fast enough.

In hindsight, it was a blessing. I came back to Hilo with a hundred grand in hush money, which I used to help Mom pay off old debts, then I went back to school and got a degree in Criminal Justice. Then I became a P.I.

I know what you’re thinking. “A private investigator in Hawaii? How glamorous!” Uh, no. Trust me, there’s nothing “Hawaiian Eye” or Magnum-ish about what I do. See, most of my caseload involves cheating spouses, generic retail fraud, petty theft, and other stupidity. For this I charge my clients $70 per hour plus mileage and expenses.

Another thing – I never sleep when I’m on the job. I can’t explain why except insomnia is another symptom of hyperadrenalism. For some reason it really doesn’t kick in for me unless I’m working a case. I figure no big deal, there’s plenty of time for sleep later.

But I love it, even if Mom never fails to remind me she wishes I had a more lucrative career or perhaps the third time with a rich lawyer will be the charm. Sure, that’ll happen. Part of it may be because most of my clients aren’t rolling in dough themselves. I wind up doing a lot of work either pro bono or for barter. That’s how I got a new flat-screen, by the way. But the truth is I’m good at what I do, even if I don’t always – what’s the TV-detective cliché? – oh, yeah, “play by the rules.” Especially in cases where my client is as big a jerk as the person he or she wants me to bust. That’s when I’m not above having them both get a little payback.

All right, so what else do you want to know about me? Well, I have a cat, a fat Himalayan named Jeff. He eats too much and spends a lot of time licking himself but he’s good company. Let’s see… I ignore popular culture on purpose so don’t use words like Kardashian or Snooki around me because I won’t have the vaguest idea what you’re babbling about. I like music, mostly mellow stuff but that doesn’t stop me from cranking up serious hard rock from time to time. I don’t drink unless I’m on a job and even then, I can put it away like a pro. Otherwise I’m strictly a green tea and water girl.

Speaking of water, I love rain. To me there’s nothing more invigorating than standing outside and just letting some of Hilo’s 130-annual inches wash over me. It’s a cleansing experience. I also play the ukulele, I’m not great at it but I’ve found it helps clear my mind. I like to think of it as four-string, three-chord meditation. Plus it’s fun.

Oh, and I like money. I make no secret of that, even though I’m far from rich and am not greedy, in the traditional sense of the word. There’s just so much more you can do with money than without it. I think I inherited that philosophy from my Dad. At least he had that going for him.

What else… I’m not a long-walks-on-the-beach kind of girl and as I said, I don’t date. Much. Wanda moved back from Vegas a while ago and is constantly setting me up with guys, but for some reason I keep finding their pictures on the FBI’s website. Mom tells me when the right one comes along, I’ll know it. Well what I know is there is no right one because most men can’t be trusted under any circumstances, whatsoever. At least all the ones I’ve ever known.

Now if we’re done here, I need to split. It looks like it’s going to rain.